SQLSaturday is a free training event for Microsoft Data Platform professionals and those wanting to learn about SQL Server, Business Intelligence and Analytics. This event will be held on Sep 14 2019 at Beda, Forskningsgången 3, Göteborg, Västra Götalands län, 417 56 Göteborg, Sweden

SQL Server Hekaton, aka In-Memory OLTP, will completely change the way you think about data management. As a DBA, you’ll need to analyze your memory and storage needs completely differently. In this session, I will show you the in-memory architecture for your Hekaton data and indexes, and discuss what gets written to disk during checkpoints, as well as what gets logged. Finally, I’ll go into detail on just what it is that makes Hekaton so much FASTER!

SQLSaturday is a free training event for Microsoft Data Platform professionals and those wanting to learn about SQL Server, Business Intelligence and Analytics. This event will be held on Jun 01 2019 at UTDallas, The Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science, 800 W. Campbell Road, Richardson, TX, Dallas, Texas, 75080-3021, United States

Note that this event was postponed from an earlier date, which was cancelled due to extreme weather conditions.

SQLSaturday is a free training event for Microsoft Data Platform professionals and those wanting to learn about SQL Server, Business Intelligence and Analytics. This event will be held on Apr 27 2019 at Microsoft Building 92, 15010 NE 36th St,, Redmond, Washington, 98052, United States

SQLSaturday is a free training event for Microsoft Data Platform professionals and those wanting to learn about SQL Server, Business Intelligence and Analytics. This event will be held on Apr 06 2019 at CTU Colorado Springs, 4435 North Chestnut Street, Colorado Springs, Colorado, 80907, United States

Faster Queries Without NOLOCK!

SQL Server offers two methods for applications to provide multi-user concurrency and provide data consistency: Pessimistic and Optimistic Concurrency Control. In this seminar we’ll discuss what consistency might mean to your applications, and describe the details of how each concurrency model works internally. We’ll examine the costs and trade-offs between the two models. Finally, we’ll examine the metadata and tools available for analyzing and troubleshooting problems.

Partition Magic

There are many reasons for partitioning your data and indexes in SQL Server, and one of them is because of the ease of moving data into and out of a table. The way SQL Server keeps track of the internal storage of partitioned data allows data movement to be done as a metadata only operation.

In this session we'll look at the metadata for table, index and partition storage to explore exactly what happens when a partition is moved. Looking at the internal details of partition storage allows us to understand the reasons for some of the restrictions on how and when we can get a benefit from partitioning.

In this session we'll look at:

How partitioning works

How your partitioned data is organized

The metadata behind your partitions

What is really happening when you switch partitions, split partitions and merge partitions

For details about SQL Saturday Redmond, including the exact location, you can go here.

SQL Server Internals for Performance

We all know that the answer to almost any SQL Server tuning question is “It Depends!”

In this seminar, I’ll tell you what you need to know in order to figure out what it actually depends on! How can you answer these “It Depends” questions in your own environment? We’ll look at what kinds of tuning changes can be made to enhance your system or application performance, and what areas of SQL Server Internals you need to understand to make the best choice for you when trying to answer the following questions:

You love learning about the internals of the tools you use. You’re comfortable writing queries and creating tables, but you don’t always understand why a particular index gets used, and another one does not. You’re not sure when SQL Server chooses to reuse an existing query plan, versus when it decides to create a new one.

You’ve been to a few 1-hour “how to tune indexes” or “how to tune queries” sessions at your local user group, SQLSaturdays, or online, and you’re ready to dig deeper. You’ve run common industry tools like sp_WhoIsActive, sp_BlitzIndex, and sp_BlitzCache, but now you want to learn where those tools get their data from.

You’re ready for SQL Server Internals 201.

This is a 2-day class offered on the following dates: August 29-30, 2018 October 30 and November 1, 2018

You’re a developer with an application that’s grown over time, and its performance has started to degrade. When your users change data with inserts/updates/deletes, they are reporting random slowdowns. The more users you get, the worse performance becomes – and you’re not allowed to purge or archive data, either.

How are you supposed to handle concurrency and scale? You don’t have a senior DBA you can escalate these problems to – maybe you work for a software vendor. (Or maybe you’re the DBA, and this is the first time you’ve hit the notorious locking, blocking, and deadlocking walls.)

Good news: SQL Server has options to help – and we’re not talking about NOLOCK.

Query Plan Options

What are the options available for looking at your query plans? When is one option better than another? What’s the difference between an estimated plan and an actual plan? In this session, we’ll look at why getting familiar with just looking at plans is the best first step to query tuning. We’ll also look at some of the latest additions to query plans, including Live Query Statistics, available starting in SQL Server 2016.

Speaking at the second meeting of the rebooted downtown Seattle SQL Server User Group:

Query Plan Options

What are the options available for looking at your query plans? When is one option better than another? What’s the difference between an estimated plan and an actual plan? In this session, we’ll look at why getting familiar with just looking at plans is the best first step to query tuning. We’ll also look at some of the latest additions to query plans, including Live Query Statistics, available starting in SQL Server 2016.

Network, develop and share your data knowledge at THE conference for leading data professionals. SQLBits is the largest SQL Server conference in Europe for data professionals, led by Microsoft Data Platform experts.

Demos and presentation for my Statistics session at SQLBits 2017 can be downloaded here.